Future of facilitation: digital blueprinting on a global scale (Part 2)
In Part 1 of my retrospective on digital facilitation, I explained how our team abandoned traditional methods of service design for a digital co-working space that allowed us to run workshops with 140+ people in three countries. In part 2, I’ll offer some tips to get the most out of a virtual room and what our plans are for the digital blueprints.
How to get the most out of the virtual room
Give a tour of a virtual room (walk the wall)
Treat the digital board in the same way you would if you were in a room with walls full of content.
Think about how you would move from one spot to another and how you’ll tell the story of the information you have collected. It might seem obvious, but setting up your boards in a sequence is incredibly important to bringing your participants on the journey.
Messy and open source is good
Don’t get too bogged down in the aesthetics.
This process is intentionally an open and collaborative experience for everyone. We found that using virtual post-its felt more comfortable to shift and build on. Too much polish can risk putting people off, making them feel stuck or alienating them from ownership of the content down the line when they might need it for another project.
Have room for flexibility
Not everyone is as comfortable as others in using digital tools.
Not all teams, ways of working and processes are the same. As hard as you try to cover all eventualities with templates, you’ll always come across a curveball and that’s where having room to adjust is really valuable.
In Miro, there is no ‘behind the scenes’. Participants can see how the workshop is set up, what activities are planned and how facilitators will run the session. They can see the stopwatch and facilitation guide. Quite often we had to spin up fresh boards, rename content and copy content midway through workshops because what was there just didn’t fit. So being flexible was key.
Working alone, together
Just like you would in a traditional workshop setting, it’s incredibly important to give participants time and space to work through activities and feel comfortable working in a digital environment.
With Miro, we would introduce a workshop activity or even pre-record an explanation before the workshop, then set the timer and off they went. It meant participants could build on each other’s ideas in real time, share documents and discussions, and feel confident contributing to the exercise. Working digitally meant there was an equal playing field and activities and discussions weren’t driven by the loudest, most opinionated or most senior person in the room.
Quick tip:
Engagement is higher when all participants are remote. Everyone is on a level playing field, and participants actively have to unmute themselves to enter the discussion. It’s also less intimidating because you can’t see everyone’s faces!
Why this new way of working really works
It’s alive!
We now have a living map of the entire front and back of our organisation. It shows how people and processes are connected and how that relates to the experience that customers have.
What’s really powerful is that everything — right down to a single arrow or post-it — is searchable and linkable. No more dog-eared posters collecting dust in drawers or desperately scrolling through pixelated photos of post its for that killer quote. It’s all there in one place.
People are talking
We had a great moment in one of our workshops where a long-standing and technically detailed stakeholder dropped in a process map next to the digital board related to a specific topic we were discussing at the time. This sparked off conversations from team members from other departments who had never seen the diagram before. It turns out the map was really useful for a job they were performing. The contextual and timely nature of this information really added detail to the subject while also connecting staff members.
It’s repeatable
We haven’t just made a living digital map, we’ve made a process that’s repeatable and has a fairly low barrier to entry. So in the future if another team needs to do this, they should be able to with a little support from the service design team. This is really powerful because it’s what is needed to embed human centred design thinking within the organisation, help teams break out of silos and think more about the experiences they are creating.
What’s next?
As our service offering continues to expand and grow globally, so does the complexity that comes with it. We’re now creating a way for all Xeros to love and tend to the blueprints, so they remain accurate. It’s all of our responsibility to keep them this way, so they remain useful to us now and in the future.
We’re also building out our service design practice, including tools and techniques to further hone our ways of working. This involves challenging ourselves to continually look for ways to create tactile environments in other ways, where we are often just pixels on a screen in many countries around the globe. Watch this space!
Special thanks to Charlotte Willcocks, Heather Madden, Georgia Allen from Xero, as well as Alex Moshovelis, Mark Ayres and Kathryn Denton from Today for your contribution to this project.
